St Antony's International Review

The Politics of Uncertainty

[An excerpt from the Theme Section Editors Introduction of Volume 13 Number 1]

"Security is a field that trades in uncertainties. In a now infamous 2002 speech before NATO, then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unwittingly captured the centrality of uncertainty:

The message is that there are no “knowns.” There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t known. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t now … And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns … It isn’t a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter.[1]

The social sciences, if they wish to remain committed to academic rigour and critical analysis, ought to treat such statements as cautionary tales about what happens when a discourse gets flooded with big words and concepts that have not been meaningfully contextualized and interrogated....."